[Ti] HD acting funny

[Dennis Fazio]

--On Wednesday, September 22, 2004 06:23 AM -0700 Sam Moussly 
<sambouka at mac.com> wrote:

> I am having doubts that my HD is dying on me.

Software updates should not make your disk unreadable. There is an 
intermittent hardware problem somewhere that is messing things up.

It could be CPU, memory, or disk.

A faulty CPU would likely exhibit problems in other areas besides disk access.
Faulty memory can cause bad sector addresses to be sent to the drive, causing 
the system to overwrite critical operational files, or screw up the 
directories. A bad disk controller could cause the worst catastrophic damage.

You can send it to AppleCare  for testing and hope they bring out the 
intermittent error. If your AppleCare is expired (or doesn't exist), you will 
have to isolate it yourself.

To do so, you need a spare firewire disk, (which TiBookers have been advised 
many times on this list to have :-) ). Boot and run from that for a while and 
see if that helps. In all of this process, be very very careful with your 
known good backup and don't put it in jeopardy. I've been there and it's a 
mess you don't want.

If you can install and run a new clean OS, that would be best to test with, 
assuming you can bring the failure out in a reasonable amount of operating 
time.

If it also fails with the new disk, then you would swap out memory.

If that doesn't help, you likely have a motherboard problem, probably the I/O 
channel logic. Hopefully, it won't come to that.
-- 
Dennis Fazio
dfz at mac.com